The Build Monkey Antipattern

Kief Morris has an interesting post on the build monkey antipattern. As someone who is currently working day-in and day-out on build systems, this is a risk that I see (and can hopefully avoid). I would maintain that having a person or team dedicated to improving the build system is not necessarily an antipattern, as long as the rest of the team is able to understand how the system works, and is able to maintain the system when the specialist of on 3 weeks holiday in South Africa. The risk is that having the specialist around means that other team members may not feel that they have ownership to make build system changes.